Nothing, but the inherent difficulty in getting the new currency off the ground. But on the other hand, what’s to stop any nation from creating a currency to displace the dollar, euro, etc?

I will say that the Cyprus bank account confiscation is the biggest reason I’ve heard for using bitcoin, outside of drug trafficking, etc. Perhaps, the Russian’s are starting to buy into BitCoin in a big way?

Nothing. There are already multiple competitors to the original Bitcoin: Namecoin, Litecoin, Strongcoin, etc. They have seen little uptake because, with the exception of Namecoin (implements a domain name system!), they have little to distinguish themselves from the original Bitcoin and so why would you use them?

Easy! Because they’re less far along their generation cycle, and you can generate more of them easier.

Since they’re all (AFAIK) deflationary like bitcoin, with a finite eventual supply (in Bitcoin’s case, 21 million), if you think they aren’t going to just die out (a huge if!) the sensible thing is to jump in now and run a spare computer 24/7 generating them…

(Full disclosure: I don’t expect any of them, including bitcoin, to have any lasting value, and have thus generated/acquired exactly zero of them.

Anyone who seriously thinks that Bitcoin will Take Over World Currency, well… should acquire several of them now, because each one will under that logic eventually be worth 1/21,000,000th of the entire world’s money.

“The value of Bitcoins is constantly fluctuating according to demand. As of June 2nd 2011, one Bitcoins was valued at $9.9 on a popular bitcoin exchange site. It was valued to be less than $1 just 6 months ago. This constant fluctuation will cause Bitcoin accepting sites to continually change prices. It will also cause a lot of confusion if a refund for a product is being made. For example, if a t shirt was initially bought for 1.5 BTC, and returned a week later, should 1.5 BTC be returned, even though the valuation has gone up, or should the new amount (calculated according to current valuation) be sent? Which currency should BTC tied to when comparing valuation? These are still important questions that the Bitcoin community still has no consensus over.”

I have noticed that when you post, there is a very high probability that you will reply to your own posts at least once and a slightly less, but still high probability that you will reply to your reply.

Andrew-prime suffers from this same inability to consolidate his thoughts.

I reply to comments, and I also find relevant information later, which is appended. I guess you prefer less information, or less support for an opinion, but, as they would say in the advertising profession, perhaps you are not the audience.

Brian, In thinking about this further, I didn’t put your comment into the correct context: that what you think I think speaks much about you. So, if YOU think that I think that toilet paper increased in prices by 45% in a three month period, You must think that I thought that was a true statement, and that YOU discovered some secret that had to be revealed to others that toilet paper did not increase by 45%. OR, you can take my statement that spurious facts and spurious correlations are no different, because they lead to the same result. Which, leads me to conclude, you are either not so subtle to grasp a joke, nor so smart to believe that others, myself included, would believe that toilet paper increased by 45%.

Look, I like the fact that you come around here with provocative and ‘contrarian to MR’ views. I think it’s healthy, and I always read your comments. I usually disagree with you, but it’s all good. C’est la vie!

Seriously? This argument again? If reading the words on an axis is enough to negate the entire effect of of otherwise misleading visualization, why follow any conventions? Why use a picture at all? Why use a consistent axis, as opposed to one with equal-spaced ticks labeled 1, 5, 6, 15, 300, 301?

It’s not about failing to read. It’s about the visualization not corresponding to the reality of the data. The increase plainly appears as relatively larger than it really is, defeating the very purpose of putting it in a picture.

If you don’t understand what a picture is supposed to add, please, just don’t use one. (Or offer your commentary on the matter.)

A week and a half ago, I put a sell order in for my small Bitcoin deposit at $60, which I wasn’t expecting to see for a few months. They sold earlier this week, and as of a few minutes ago the price was bumping up against $80.

De-sarcing. That’s just the exchange rate. Of course at this point, most people still evaluate by exchange rate.

Now the irony comes in the money supply. The most damn stable of them all that is ultimately deflationary. Have you looked at the Fed’s recently? Even though dollars are inflating over the years of course, in much shorter time periods, the supply (buying, monetizing, easing) is erratic.

I’ve seen a lot of casual dismissals over bitcoin but few hard numbers.

Here’s one: The M1 monetary base of bitcoins is $781,000,000. Less than a billion dollars. That’s utter chickenfeed in international currency terms. For what could very well be the digital version of gold, a non-fiat ‘flight to safety’ currency with a fixed stock, the value of bitcoins may still be incredibly low. Consider too that bitcoin is a global currency with few transaction costs in terms of acquisition (aside from the PITA of registering at exchanges if you acquire them with existing currencies, although I expect this issue to subside as they grow in popularity). We’ve already witnessed evidence of this with Cyprus. If bitcoin’s M1 became just 1% of the US Dollar, the exchange rate would be $2,247/BTC.